GDP Falls Under Trump

Mar 17, 2026 07:53 PM EDT, Tue

New GDP data paints an even uglier picture on the faltering Trump-era economy

In the first year of Trump’s second term, economic growth fell to a nine-year low, and job growth fell to a 16-year low. The White House hasn’t said why.

Mar. 13, 2026, 10:37 AM EDT By Steve Benen

Throughout last year, as the U.S. economy struggled, Republican officials repeatedly insisted that there was good news on the way, and Americans wouldn’t have to wait too much longer to see satisfying results. As recently as August, for example, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent confidently predicted to a national television audience that the U.S. economy is “really going to pick up in the fourth quarter” of 2025.

It did not pick up in the fourth quarter of 2025. CNBC reported:

Economic growth was much slower than expected in the final three months of 2025 while core inflation rose to start 2026, the Commerce Department reported Friday.

Gross domestic product, a measure of all the goods and services produced across the sprawling U.S. economy, rose at a seasonally and inflation-adjusted annual rate of just 0.7% in the fourth quarter, according to the department’s Bureau of Economic Analysis.

The original expectations for the fourth quarter, spanning October through December, was 2.5% growth. This led to disappointment a month ago when a preliminary tally showed 1.4% growth.

This newly revised figure showed the economy grew at just half of that earlier, disappointing data.

What’s more, in light of this new information, we now know that the economy grew at a 2.1% pace across all of 2025 — down from 2.8% in 2024. Excluding the pandemic, 2025 showed the weakest economic growth in the United States in nine years.

In other words, despite endless Republican hype, economic growth and job growth were significantly stronger during Joe Biden’s final year in office compared with the first year of Donald Trump’s second term.

The White House has not yet offered a persuasive explanation as to why the economy got worse after the Republican returned to the Oval Office.

On the contrary, during one of JD Vance’s recent Faux News appearances, the vice president celebrated the “Trump boom” in the economy. A week earlier, Peter Navarro, a leading White House voice on trade and economic policy, told Fox News that the U.S. economy was “perfect.”

If leading members of Team Trump were trying to appear out of touch, would they have said anything different?

This post updates our related earlier coverage.

Steve Benen is a producer for “The Rachel Maddow Show,” the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He’s also the bestselling author of “Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans’ War on the Recent Past.”

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